Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Putin Moves to Combat ‘Complete Chaos’ in Russia’s Funeral Industry

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 7 – As Vladimir
Putin prepares to run for re-election and is casting about for initiatives to suggest
he is genuinely concerned about the Russian people, the incumbent Kremlin
leader has now found an issue that ultimately affects everyone – the funeral
industry, one that in Russia exists in what observers call “complete chaos.”

But while Putin’s intervention may
win him some support from increasingly hard-pressed pensioners who often do not
have enough money for food and clothing let alone funeral expenses and who face
a “gray” market that prays on them, his raising of this issue highlights just
how serious a problem cemeteries and the burial industry now are.

No one knows how many Russian cemeteries
there are – the finance ministry puts the number at 80,000 but others say it is
far larger – no one is certain who owns most of them, and no one has succeeded
in blocking the expanding role of quasi-legal operators who take enormous sums
from Russians at a most difficult time.

Into this mess, Putin has now
inserted himself, Yekaterina Gerashchenko of Kommersant reports, pointing out that the Kremlin leader’s solution
is to draft new laws and extend what he sees as the best practices of the state
as exemplified by Moscow to the rest of the Russian Federation (kommersant.ru/doc/3377853).

The journalist reports that Putin
has sent a list of demands to the government calling for reforms. Among them
would be to do an inventory of existing cemeteries, establish nation-wide rules
for their exploitation, and create conditions so that Russians would be able to
pay for internment with their pension insurance alone, rather than having to
save on their own.

To those ends, the Kremlin leader is
calling for a new law – the current legislation governing cemeteries was
adopted in 1996 and is outdated and regulations that would reduce the amount of
spending on funerals and drive out the “gray” industry which extracts 120-150
billion rubles (2 to 2.5 billion US dollars) from Russians every year.

That is on top of the 60 billion
rubles (1 billion US dollars) various parts of the Russian government now
spend.

“In a majority of regions,” the Kommersant journalist says, there are no
guaranteed services provided or even information given to the population about
what it could do. “In every sixth region, there is not even a specialized
service which could provide such support (often these functions are fulfilled
by private business).”

Still worse, there is no common
price list or standards for caskets or other funeral expenses. As a result,
some Russians have to or want to pay hundreds of times what others do for
burial.Andrey Chibis, the deputy construction
minister with responsibilities in this area, says that today the situation in the
funeral business in Russia is one of “complete chaos.”